Google rolled out a powerful new feature to AI Mode in Search this week. It’s called Personal Intelligence, and it weaves together many of the company’s existing services in a radical new way.
This was also launched recently in Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot. Business Insider’s Pranav Dixit tried it and was blown away. Here’s his review:
Personal Intelligence feels like Google has been quietly taking notes on my entire life and finally decided to hand me the notebook.
With my permission, Gemini can tap into my Google account — Gmail, Photos, Search history, YouTube, and more — and reason across all of it to answer questions the way a human assistant might, except this one has years of receipts on my life.
This is something I’ve wanted since AI-powered chatbots blew up in late 2022. Back then, I’d pour my soul into ChatGPT and get a smart answer. Then, the bot would immediately forget I existed, like a genius goldfish. Over the last few years, OpenAI and Anthropic have enabled their chatbots to connect to services like Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar. But Google has home field advantage: it already has the broadest view of what you’ve actually done, searched, watched, and saved.
Gemini’s ability to connect the dots is scary-good, well beyond what ChatGPT or Claude can do. When I asked it for sightseeing ideas for my parents, who have already visited the Bay Area a few times, it suggested museums and gardens, correctly inferring they’ve already done hikes and trips to redwood forests.
When I asked Gemini how it knew, it told me it deduced this based on “breadcrumbs” left across my Google account: Family emails, photos of Muir Woods, a parking reservation in Gmail, and a Google search for “easy hikes for seniors.”
This is so powerful that Google is already trying to preempt the freak-out. VP Josh Woodward said Google takes “steps to filter or obfuscate personal data” from the conversations we have with Gemini.
“We don’t train our systems to learn your license plate number; we train them to understand that when you ask for one, we can locate it,” he wrote recently.
So, I asked it for my license plate number and it was able to locate it, based on photos of my car in Google Photos.
I also asked Gemini when my car insurance was up for renewal and it correctly told me, based on emails from AAA in my Gmail inbox.
When I asked it to help me plan an upcoming trip, it accounted for the fact that we’re traveling with an infant — because it already knows we have a new baby. Of course it does.
This is the future every AI company keeps promising. Last year, Meta said its new north star wasn’t “the metaverse” — that alternate VR universe the company is literally named after — but “personal superintelligence,” an AI that “knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them.”
One path to that vision: AI-powered glasses that can see and hear what you see and hear, turning everyday life into the raw material for an always-on assistant. To get there, Meta has poured billions of dollars into a hiring spree and into the data centers needed to run it all.
But Meta doesn’t have a digital record of my life like Google does. I barely post on Facebook. I mostly swipe through Instagram Reels. WhatsApp is encrypted. And after Meta killed Supernatural, my favorite VR workout app, I have very little reason to use its Quest headset anymore.
Meta talks about “personal superintelligence” as a future goal. As far as I’m concerned, Google just shipped it.
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